“Yeah, it means some courses students want to take next year won’t be available and they’ll have to wait until next year,” Stauffer said. “There might be some problems in terms of scheduling, but it’s not as though half of the department is going on leave.”

English concentrator Meghan A. Day ’05 said she wasn’t aware of the number of professors going on leave next year, despite having heard vague rumors.

“It seems pretty typical for a student to try to build a harmony in their schedule, rather than just taking it one year at a time,” she said. “And definitely sometimes you look at the catalogue and think ‘next year,’ when that’s not a saf e way to do things with something like this going on.”

According to Day, she hadn’t received any formal notice of the absences, though she noted that at a recent junior tutorial sign-up meeting, students were told their junior projects were more likely to be supervised by graduate students.

“This year they said they’d rather you present an idea, then they’ll find a grad student,” Day said. “There was the sense that there would be fewer professors to go around.”

—Staff writer Ben A. Black can be reached at bblack@fas.harvard.edu.